Page 160 - Education World Dec 2021

Cover Story

EDUCATIONWORLD

INDIA PRESCHOOL

RANKINGS 2021-22

With pre-primary education hit hardest by the pandemic
lockdown for the second year in succession, we are obliged
to publish a truncated survey. C fore personnel interviewed
3,205 sample respondents to rate preschools in six cities on
ten parameters of early childhood excellence

Dilip Thakore

O NE OF THE CONSPICUOUS successes ever ratings and ranking of private pre-primaries, aka

Therefore in 2010, your editors conducted the first
of EducationWorld, ambitiously
launched in November 1999 with
preschools — some of them of over 50 years vintage but
almost totally unknown beyond their civic ward limits —
the mission “to build the pressure
in India’s major cities. The annual ranking surveys were
of public opinion to make education
the #1 item on the national agenda,”
is that it has impacted the vital
conferences at which ECCE experts of international and
importance of professionally followed up with star-studded seminars, workshops and
national renown called attention to the crucial role of
administered early childhood scientifically designed, play-based, interactive curriculums
care and education (ECCE) upon the academy, policy and global best practices, and India’s most-reputed ECCE
formulators and the public. providers networked and exchanged notes.
Today it’s difficult to believe that a decade ago there was Thus far, EducationWorld has conducted nine national
little awareness in the academy and government that good surveys rating preschools on selected parameters of pre-
quality ECCE is critically important because it builds the primary education excellence and ranked them inter se in
foundation of all future learning. In the new millennium, 16 cities and towns of India. Moreover, we have staged an
James Heckman, a Nobel Prize winning economist, posited equivalent number of national ECCE Awards nites at which
that a dollar spent on professionally provided ECCE saves hitherto totally ignored promoters, principals and teachers
$16 in higher education because students provided quality of top-ranked preschools across the country were certified
early childhood education are mentally and emotionally and celebrated.
equipped to absorb knowledge and grasp abstract concepts It is also pertinent to note that private preschools apart,
with greater speed and facility. since 2018 we have been rating, ranking and celebrating

160 EDUCATIONWORLD DECEMBER 2021